“I think you guys need a reality check,” Christine Wilson, a Gilbert High School senior, told the Gilbert School Board last week. The school board met last Monday to determine whether sexual orientation should be added to the school district’s nondiscrimination and harassment policies.

The school board decided it should not. Which makes it clear that Wilson’s comment is all too true.

Despite emotional pleas asking the board to amend the policy, board members came to the conclusion that adding sexual discrimination to the school district’s harassment policy would not create a safer environment for students.

Well, it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Jerryn Johnston, a senior at Gilbert High School, was the one who requested the change, after repeated harassment because he is openly gay. He says his car has been vandalized several times on school property. Johnston and his mother, Sue Ellen Tuttle, have been pleading with the school board since earlier this year to change the policy.

And days after the announcement that the policy would not be amended, Johnston claimed he was verbally harassed at his high school yet again.

The school board should be ashamed for not doing its job. Ignoring a pertinent issue like discrimination and harassment based on sexual orientation casts a bad shadow on the school district as a whole.

What is their reasoning for not amending the policy? It doesn’t cost anything, and could only enhance the safety of students at the schools. This failure to recognize a problem will only lead to more and more problems – likely more severe than taunting – in the future. The school district claims its harassment policy encompasses everyone, and adding sexual orientation to the nondiscrimination policy is unnecessary.

If that is the case, why have a nondiscrimination policy at all? Maybe people with disabilities and minorities shouldn’t get any of the “special” rights. After all, it’s only fair. If “sex, race, national origin, creed, age, marital status, or disability” are important enough to include, why not sexual orientation, where there have been documented cases of discrimination against students?

Parents at the school board meeting argued that, since homosexuality is not consistent with the teachings of some religions, there would be confusion as to what is and isn’t moral to students.

But religion has nothing to do with this. The church and the state are separate; the board is there to ensure that discrimination does not occur.

The board failed. It appears religious beliefs played a role in the decision, and the school board let the community down. It let the students down.

What would it take to change the policy? Assault? Theft? Murder?

Maybe then, the school board would get its reality check.

editorialboard: Andrea Hauser, Tim Paluch, Michelle Kann, Charlie Weaver, Omar Tesdell